Abstract

With the significant influence and increasing requirements of visual mobile communications in our everyday lives, low bit-rate video coding to handle the stringent bandwidth limitations of mobile networks has become a major research topic. With both processing power and battery resources being inherently constrained, and signals having to be transmitted over error-prone mobile channels, this has mandated the design requirement for coders to be both low complexity and robust error resilient. To support multilevel users, any encoded bit-stream should also be both scalable and embedded. This chapter presents a review of appropriate image and video coding techniques for mobile communication applications and aims to provide an appreciation of the rich and far-reaching advancements taking place in this exciting field, while concomitantly outlining both the physical significance of popular quality image and video coding metrics and some of the research challenges that remain to be resolved.